It started with one man’s vision of how safety concerns should be managed in the airline industry. In 1997, Jean-Pierre Dagon, Corporate Director of Safety for AirTran Airways set about to design and deploy an airline safety program that had high expectations and some pragmatic doctrines that challenged conventional thinking and approaches. Since that time AirTran Airways has recorded successful and dramatic results. One of the first steps taken by Mr. Dagon was to adopt REASON Root Cause Analysis Technology throughout the corporation. His goals were to first pinpoint the systemic issues that impacted airline safety performance and experience, and then to establish a base of information from which trends and patterns could be extracted to design and manage prevention and risk assessment activities. Safety activities were designed to achieve the criteria set by the company’s mission statements, “Taking personal responsibility for the safety of each traveler and every crew member. Acting with an empowered "can do" spirit to continuously improve our airline.” Mr. Dagon has agreed to share his experience, perceptions and safety philosophy on operations control, operations improvement and decision making in the airline industry through his recent presentation at the Federal Aviation Administration’s 2004 Annual Workshop on Risk Analysis and Safety Performance Measurements in Aviation. The theme of the workshop was Building a Safety Management System (SMS).

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